The Unsustainable Lifestyle

Dischord; 2004

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Fans of Smart Went Crazy who just can't accept the fact that Chad Clark is capable of producing anything short of brilliance should save themselves the trauma and skip right to The Unsustainable Lifestyle's seventh track, "Such Large Portions!", a serene rocker packed with pitch-bent guitars and acrobatic drumming; or crank up the cacophonous, multitracked percussion of the Breeders-esque "The Western Prayer". Either of these songs could allow a person to maintain, indefinitely, that Clark is among indie music's great talents, so long as they never delved into the rest of this record.

The band, however, have made the regrettable decision of opening their long-awaited debut full-length with "Goodnight for Real", a listless jingle on which Chad Clark sings, "There's a band on stage tonight/ Every note they play turns its back to you." It's a sentiment that pretty much sums things up for fans of Clark's former band, whose emotional doomsaying and snappy minor-key geometry produced one of the best post-punk albums of the last decade. Unfortunately, all that made Con Art so effective is lost on The Unsustainable Lifestyle, save an overbearing cynicism, which, lacking an apposite musical backing, quickly grows tiresome.

Since the late 90s, the once-influential Dischord Records harvest has proven the seminal D.C. punk label hell-bent on one goal: capturing that never-influential J. Robbins sound. So far, the label has been fairly successful at putting forth a sturdy lineup of D.C. post-punk prospects who, with proper guidance, may one day ascend to great heights. But what they seem to have failed to appreciate is that each band has a vastly different array of talents, and whether through mismanagement or the bands' own aspirations to a preconceived "Dischord sound", their creativity has too often been stifled.

The Beauty Pill, thanks in part to their high-profile ancestry and their solid 2001 EP, Cigarette Girl from the Future, have been billed as the most promising of the lot. But expectation is a cynic's death knell, and on The Unsustainable Lifestyle, the band cuddles up to the safety of innocuous clichés. Instead of tearing loose here, The Beauty Pill elect to bottle their ample cynicism, and any emotional impact is lost to a relentless finery. Vocalists Clark and Rachel Burke often struggle to hit their notes, but rather than conceal a limited vocal range with flanger effects or high-volume ululations, they hog the spotlight with ambiguous verses. Perhaps most estranging is the caustic chirpiness of "Won't You Be Mine", which opens with a sample of Mr. Rogers offering friendship, and vaguely hints at a discourse on race relations. The chorus asks the question, "What I really want to know is/ Are you my nigga?" with delineation offered only in lyrics like, "The leash is loose enough to feel like autonomy/ The milk's watered down in the tenement kitchenette." Another misstep lies in the band's apparent unwillingness to attempt vocal harmonies: Possessing a halfway competent duo of vocalists is a rare blessing that The Beauty Pill sorely squander.

The Beauty Pill are a surgically precise band whose compositions perform limber arabesques without losing a step, and Clark's homespun production accentuates every contortion. But then, that's Dischord in a nutshell. What was novel and exciting about Jawbox and Burning Airlines a decade ago is quickly growing stale in modern incarnations like this one. For a label that once prided itself on the spit-in-the-wind innovation of bands like Fugazi, Minor Threat, Jawbox, Rites of Spring, and Shudder to Think, its recent catalog's homogeneity is disconcerting. I'd be lying if I claimed not to enjoy J. Robbins' earlier work, but his production style was never more than a pedestal for adroit musicianship; it's feckless of a record like The Unsustainable Lifestyle to cling to ghosts when the musicians behind it have proven themselves capable of so much more.